Open access. Workforce studies show a declining proportion of UK junior doctors proceeding directly to specialist training, with many taking career breaks. Doctors may be choosing to delay this important career decision.

The article explores how visual communications in the training environment can contribute to solving the productivity puzzle. Topics discussed include Great Britain's economy being in the position to most to gain from increasing visual communications to employees, research that investigated how the brain responds differently to different types of workplace communication and adjustments businesses can make to increase their productivity levels. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.

BPS blog post. It is better to ask a student to see if they can explain something to themselves, than for a teacher or book to always explain it to them. That’s according to a new meta-analysis of the findings from 64 prior studies involving nearly 6000 participants that compared learning outcomes from prompted self-explanation compared to instructor explanation, or compared to time spent using other study techniques such as taking notes, summarising, thinking out loud (without the reflection and elaboration involved in self-explanation), or solving more problems.
The authors of the meta-analysis, published recently in Educational Psychology Review, say that self-explanation is a powerful learning strategy because learners “generate inferences about causal connections and conceptual relationships that enhance understanding”. The process of self-explanation also helps the learner realise what they don’t know, “to fill in missing information, monitor understanding, and modify fusions of new information with prior knowledge when discrepancies or deficiencies are detected”.

BPS Blog post. “Learning styles” – there can be few ideas that have created such a stark disconnect between the experts on the ground and the evidence published in scholarly journals. Endorsed by the overwhelming majority of teachers, yet dismissed by most psychologists and educational neuroscientists as a “neuromyth”, the basis of learning styles is that people learn better when taught via their preferred learning modality, usually (but not always) described as either visual, auditory or kinaesthetic.
Many studies have already uncovered serious problems with the learning styles concept, such as that measures of learning styles are invalid and that students do not in fact learn better via their preferred modality. Now further evidence against learning styles comes from Greece, in one of the first investigations on the topic to involve primary school pupils.
Writing in Frontiers in Education, Marietta Papadatou-Pastou and her colleagues report that teachers and pupils did not agree on the pupils’ preferred learning modality – a significant blow for the learning styles concept since “teachers typically adopt learning styles within a classroom context by relying on their own assessment of students’ learning styles.”

Research commissioned by the General Medical Council (GMC) for its 2018 The state of medical education and practice in the UK report paints a stark picture of unabated pressure on health services. The report also shines a light on steps that some doctors are feeling the need to take to cope with patient numbers, some of which may be piling more pressure on other parts of the system.

Open access. Physicians in training must achieve a high degree of proficiency in performing physical examinations and must strive to become experts in the field. Concerns are emerging about physicians’ abilities to perform these basic skills, essential for clinical decision making. Learning at the bedside has the potential to support skill acquisition through deliberate practice.

In this new case study, we find out how University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust built a positive culture around exception reporting.
Exception reporting benefits both junior doctors and employers. The process enables any issues to be highlighted, giving employers the chance to address them early in the placement. This means a safer working environment and a better educational experience for junior doctors.

Letter. We were delighted to read the recent Postgraduate Medical Journal article by Gillen et al 1 describing their explorative findings in relation to Kate Granger’s #hellomynameis campaign.2 Introducing oneself by name, along with an explanation of one’s role, is key to a positive introduction by healthcare professionals to patients, but this is often omitted.2 The ‘#hellomynameis…’ campaign was founded by Dr Kate Granger, following her experiences as a patient. She found that healthcare professionals rarely introduced themselves to her, leading Kate to feel that this missing ‘basic step in communication’ was ‘incredibly wrong’.2 Gillen and his colleagues in Ireland1 point out that there has been little research to examine how doctors (or other healthcare professionals) introduce themselves to patients. Our approach was slightly different: volunteer medical students ….... To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.

Open access. There are a few studies of alignment between different knowledge-indices for evidence-based medicine (EBM). The aim of this study was to investigate whether the type of test used to assess knowledge of EBM affects the estimation of this knowledge in medical students.

he Design Initiatives team collaborates with partner school districts and community organizations, as well as with Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College students, faculty and staff, to develop innovative solutions to the “wicked” problems in education. To
achieve this, we use an intentional, collaborative, open-ended design process that values local context, diverse perspectives, intrapreneurial thinking and iterative testing of solutions.
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” — Herbert Simon